“Just when the question of how to live had become clearer to him, a new insoluble problem presented itself - Death.”

“To earn more, you must learn more.”

“Religion,” [some] argue, “may be all right for certain emotional people, but you can’t beat a man who believes in himself.” But this self-confident generation has produced more alcoholics, more dope addicts, more criminals, more wars, more broken homes, more assaults, more embezzlements, more murders, and more suicides than any other generation that ever lived. It is time for all of us to take stock of our failures, blunders, and costly mistakes. It is about time that we put less confidence in ourselves and more trust and faith in God.”

“One of the most common causes of failure is the habit of quitting when one is overtaken by temporary defeat. Every person is guilty of this mistake at one time or another.”

“Whenever men and women straighten their backs up, they are going somewhere, because a man can't ride your back unless it is bent”

“For love? What antediluvian notions you have! Can one talk of love in these days?" said the ambassador's wife. "What's to be done? It's a foolish old fashion that's kept up still," said Vronsky.”

“In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”

“If we fail to meet the challenge of either Soviet or Western imperialism, then no amount of foreign aid, no aggrandizement of armaments, no new pacts or doctrines or high-level conferences can prevent further setbacks to our course and to our security.”

“There are many causes that I am prepared to die for, but no causes that I am prepared to kill for.”

“On a shirt, every button has its own button-hole. Fix a button elsewhere and your dressing goes crazy and nasty! On earth, everyone has his/her dreams. You have your own. Fix yourself there and your life will be fully fulfilled!”

“By failing to prepare you are preparing to fail.

“Aren't all these notes the senseless writings of a man who won't accept the fact that there is nothing we can do with suffering except to suffer it?”

“Do not deny the classical approach, simply as a reaction, or you will have created another pattern and trapped yourself there.”

“Find a voice in a whisper.”

“A man who won't die for something is not fit to live.”